Creating Hide Slides Preset in PowerPoint

If you have created a beautiful slide complete with animation and all those bells and whistles, it can be a waste to delete it if you’re not going to use it. Especially if you may find a good use for those slides in a later time. Good thing there’s a hide function in PowerPoint. The Hide Slides function in PowerPoint allows you to literally hide your slide, or slides, in a presentation. This way, you don’t have to delete the slides. They can still be part of the presentation, but they will not appear once you activate the “Slideshow” mode. Here is how to create Hide Slides Preset in PowerPoint.

The Hide Slides function is useful if you have created slides that you don’t want to remove or plan to use in a different time or in a different presentation. You can also create different sets of slides with messages tailored to your specific audience segments, then you can just hide the other slides you don’t need to show in one audience segment, to have a smooth flow in your presentation. This trick is useful instead of just skipping through those slides and confusing or distracting your audience.

Hide Slide Preset in PowerPoint

How to Hide a Slide

To hide a slide, just right click on it and select the “Hide” option in the context menu. You can also select multiple slides to hide them. Just select the slides that you need by pressing on CTRL and clicking on each slide that you want to hide if they’re not in succession. You may also press on SHIFT and click on a range of slides to select them. Then, right click on a slide and select the “Hide” option to hide the multiple slides you have selected.

While this Hide option is great, it can also be complicated when you’re constantly updating your presentation, and the slide numbers keep changing. But no worries–PowerPoint has a solution with the help of Hide Slides Preset.

Hide Slide Function in PowerPoint

What is the Hide Slides Preset

The Hide Slides Preset allows you to automatically hide your selected slides so you take the hassle out of this function especially when you’re always updating your presentation.

In order to perform this function that will save you hours of work on your presentations, you first have to use the Notes panel. Think of a phrase that you don’t usually use in your presentation. You may also add characters such as exclamation marks so that you will easily see the phrase among your slides.

Write Unique Phrase in Slide Notes

In this example, we will use the phrase !!HIDE THIS!!

Now, you open the presentation where you want to hide some slides. Then, click the Notes button at the bottom of the slide work area pane. Now, add your “!!HIDE THIS!!” phrase in the Notes. If you already have notes in the slide, you can add this phrase at the very bottom.

Then, add this same note to all the slides that you plan to hide. Now, you have marked all your slides ready for hiding. You can then go to the Slide Sorter view by clicking on the Grid Icon at the bottom right part of the PowerPoint window.

Once you’re on the Slide Sorter view, use the Find and Replace button under the Editing menu to look for your phrase. Once you have selected the slides, right-click any one of them and select the “Hide” option from the context menu the way you do with the hide feature discussed above.

Automatically Select Slides to Hide

Now, you can hide and unhide the slides that you want without doing this one by one each time, which can take much of your time. You can also hide slides in different combinations by using different “hide” phrases. Just be careful to use phrases that don’t appear in your slides so that they can be easily sorted and recognized as you set your preset.

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